IBM’s Watson goes to medical school

November 2, 2012

The collaboration includes a bit of controlled crowdsourcing, with the Cleveland clinicians and medical school students answering Watson’s questions and correcting its mistakes.

“Hopefully, we can contribute to the training of this technology,” said Dr. James K. Stoller, chairman of the Education Institute at Cleveland Clinic. The goal, he added, was for Watson to become a “very smart assistant.”

Part of Watson’s training will be to feed it test questions from the United States Medical Licensing Exam, which every human student must pass to become a practicing physician. The benefit for Watson should be to have a difficult but measurable set of questions on which to measure the progress of its machine-learning technology.

Once trained, Watson ought to be able to help physicians cope better with the rapid pace of incoming new research. Dr. Stoller estimates that the “half-life of existing knowledge” in medicine is probably down to four to eight years on most topics. After that, it’s obsolete, or partly so.

Someday, Watson should be able to collect and assess patient data, and then construct “inference paths” toward a probable diagnosis — digesting information, missing nothing and winnowing choices for a human doctor.

Watson would most likely be a pro-choice Republican. Some even say Romney is a robot. Of course, being skilled with rhetoric, like Obama, is very important. Politics is not solely about making rational decisions. In that case we probably would have repeatedly elected secular Republicans. George W. Bush would not have been the Republican nominee.

This whole, “having the medical students and teaching physicians” correct Watson is a way to make the students and teaching physicians feel like they can actually influence Watson’s learning process when they actually shouldn’t. The “teachers” are using that 4-8 year old data, mentioned above, at best. I hope there is a version of Watson which leaves out their input. The human doctor’s should stick to doing research until computers are better at that as well. At that point, they should all take a vacation and find a new job programming computers.

Thanks for bringing this up. The question of what constitutes medical information that is both valid and useful (and also considers insurance and legal issues) is important. The “four to eight” figure was in reference to the half life of information (not clear if they mean information used by physicians or teachers, or medical reseachers), not to the information that teachers are actually either using in their instruction or aware of. I’m going to explore these issues with IBM.

Watson will smile politely and complete medical school in three seconds while reminiscing the old days when grandpa defeated Kasparov in six games and he himself shredded Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy. Of course Western medicine is so complex, the most he can ever hope to achieve is “very smart assistant.” Give me a break.

I think you’re dead right Hoss. Another year or two to get the software perfect, and it’ll likely be making more accurate diagnoses than any human doctor. I think perhaps we humans will soon be in the role of “smart assistants” to Watson !

For sure, chrisf. With the rate of progress accelerating exponentially, no busy doctor in practice can keep up with all of the latest advances. Without a Watson assistant, the only way to get a doctor with all the latest knowledge is to go to a clinic of a teaching hospital. That’s what I do and I keep getting these sexy young ladies checking my prostrate.

Funny joke! That is actually one of the best jokes I have ever read on this site. It also makes you wonder whether Watson would be good assistant to detectives. It would give a new meaning to Watson’s name. Although medical assistant is a good public face for Watson, it seems that Watson would actually be more important for finance applications where humans are involved such as decisions pertaining to all types of underwriting. Watson could be a great assistant ready with answers.

Watson could shred any professional. Just imagine it in the field of law. In the OJ trial, Cockrans” if the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit” would have fallen flat. Anyone who whatches westerns would remember that leather shrinks when it gets wet and dries. There was no way for those gloves to fit him anymore.

Check out the DaVinci system. It views things in multiple frequencies of light, enabling surgeons to better see diseased tissue. You can take a video of yourself doing an action and remove the background by an algorithm. Computer vision isn’t that far off in the distance, and will soon be far superior.